21 ms·

Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecraft creator (2011)

301 points by ROARosen 6y ago

viro 6y ago
says the guy that got paid $2.5 billion.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  I don't see how that's relevant, he said piracy won't matter for the games success and he was able to cash out 2.5BN even though this was the stance of Mojang. If anything, it proves his point.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wassenaar10 6y ago
  He said this in 2011, 3 years before he got paid $2.5 billion
- inetknght 6y ago
  Minecraft has been heavily pirated. Despite that, he still ended up getting a massive payout after his claims about piracy.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Doesn't that support his point? Game was pirated, still made bank?
swiley 6y ago
It's a bummer he disappeared though I understand why. He had a lot of good stuff to say. Edit: Oh I guess he's still on twitter.
- Karawebnetwork 6y ago
  Did he? His Twitter is still active and his last message was 34 minutes ago.
- vernie 6y ago
  It's a bummer that he didn't disappear.
- Vetre 6y ago
  wasn't he transphobic and racist? I remember seeing a lot of news about how bad he was online.
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    Honestly, I'd say he was making the same logical fallacies that pretty much every other human on Earth is making. But it is the case that the output of his errors were extremely socially unacceptable. This is how I feel about most situations where someone tries to claim they are good and the other is bad. To me, it's really just that one is lucky and the other is not. Neither is substantially more aware of their own cognitive shortcomings, and -- even when they are -- that's a form of luck as well. Of all the privileges in life, I think the last I'd be willing to trade is sanity. And sanity is basically just more or less fallacies per thought. I'm tired of the words "good" and "bad" being applied amidst people who are all running the same OS.
    - LocalH 6y ago
      >people who are all running the same OS I don't think we can claim that by any stretch.
      - seph-reed 6y ago
        Compare it to DogOS or CowOS or even FungiOS. We are extremely sensitive to our own differences. But humans are by and large very, very similar when put in perspective of all life.
        LocalH 6y ago
        I still disagree on the latter part. Our OS is largely cobbled together by our brains on the fly, and so everyone's is quite unique and based on their life experience.
        seph-reed 6y ago
        Ah. We're on a nature vs nurture debate. Ofc, it's a spectrum. And as we evolve we go from being more nature based to being more nurture based. But I'd say we're a long way off from being more nurture than nature, given that 100% nurture would be a being fully capable of self design. Most people can't even stop themselves from procrastinating (like me right now). We can't even manage to coexist with the planet, when we know it's going to destroy everything when we don't. If you want to believe that us big great humans are in control of ourselves and unlike those stupid animals we're products of nurture, that's your dopamine hit to take. But based off everything I've seen, the only time we really become our brains is when the the Pre-frontal cortex is engaged and suppresses all the other more instinctual parts of the brain. And even for very smart and/or dedicated people, it's extremely difficult to quiet all natural instincts for any extended length of time. IMO, we're barely out of the bushes in terms of the path from being beasts of nature to becoming beings of self-design and nurture.
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting to me how communities form ideas around this. While “piracy is not theft”, you’ll see people talk about how some repost “stole my content” with lots of support for the supposed victim. Simultaneously, some people will say that they are contributing by using a product and telling their friends while others will post on /r/choosingbeggars to mock the exposure argument. This implies we are somewhat short of universal agreement on this subject: perhaps far enough that we cannot determine that just because “piracy is not theft”, it does not mean it is acceptable.
- maedla 6y ago
  Isn't this just plagiarism? No one is downloading Photoshop and saying they created it (probably lol).
- skummetmaelk 6y ago
  There's a difference between copying for personal use and distributing to others against payment of any type. Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder. Piracy not being theft only applies if you would have _never_ bought the product in the first place, had it not been free to copy. If you redistribute some content on youtube you are "stealing" eyeballs and ad money from the original creator.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    > Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder. This argument can get muddy because of parties that are involved between the creator and the consumer, like record companies. Where sometimes the original creator does not see any money (or an unfair low amount) and all the intermediates reap the most profit for basically sitting on an acquired IP or copyright. I'd love to give money to a original creator for their effort in creating their art to support them to create more, but I hate to fuel an industry that is actively fighting creation and innovation by lobbying for extended copyright and artificially fragmenting supply and hindering paying users with DRM (digital restrictions management).
CharlesW 6y ago
Previous discussion with some interesting thoughts on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283785
scj 6y ago
There's a difference between a stowaway and taking the ship. One's infringement, the other is piracy (or theft in the more general case).
- contravariant 6y ago
  I can't deny that taking the ship counts as piracy, but I think that's somewhat different from the kind being discussed here.
- f1refly 6y ago
  You don't take the ship though, you copy the ship. There will be two ships, one for you and the original. It's a win-win situation.
tgbugs 6y ago
In my memory Gabe Newell was one of the first to articulate this point in the game dev community, however going back to check the dates, it seems that it was in October or November of 2011, suggesting that Notch may actually have kicked off this thread.
- lloeki 6y ago
  2008 report from 2D Boy: ~90% piracy rate for World of Goo https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy It was one of the first reports with halfway solid data. And the argument dates from way before that.
  - kuschku 6y ago
    And the other article it links shows that 1000 pirated copies only convert into 1 single legitimate copy. So if you have a 90% piracy rate, and eliminate all pirates, your sales increase by roughly 1%.
bni 6y ago
Some games surely has lost sales due to piracy. Recent example: Doom Eternal was shipped with an unencrypted exe in a subfolder by mistake. Surely lots of people that would have impulse bought the hot new game didn't when it could be torrented on launch.
- the_af 6y ago
  I think people who impulse buy will impulse buy no matter what. About people downloading illegal copies, in TFA Notch is quoted as saying: > “If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week” He also argues that the concept of "lost sales" itself is dodgy, or at least used carelessly. Some examples he mentions: > “Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?”
- musingsole 6y ago
  Lack of product awareness among consumers is far more of a suppressing force to profits than converting every last bit of interest in your product to monetary value is a boost to profits. This is likely less true for certain AAA titles, but on the whole, most people who buy things are busy and not avidly following any one brand in particularly. Fanboys (despite their clamor) are rarer than casual purchasers for most everything. In an absolute sense, there may be "lost sales" due to piracy, but that comparison misses any potential additional sales due to piracy helping to spread awareness of a product.
- account42 6y ago
  > Recent example: Doom Eternal was shipped with an unencrypted exe in a subfolder by mistake. Surely lots of people that would have impulse bought the hot new game didn't when it could be torrented on launch. I don't think it counts as an example when the lost sales are an assumption and not backed by data.
incrudible 6y ago
> Lost sales don't exist That's easily disproven. When SWIM was young, he used to pirate lots of games, most of which he wouldn't have bought, but some of which he would have bought if there had not been a working day zero PDX release. In this manner, SWIM saved some money to invest in weed instead.
loceng 6y ago
I have a strong intuition that if you price things fairly, if you're governing well, people will be willing to pay - and that piracy ultimately happens because either 1) society isn't providing enough foundational resources to the largest cog in the wheel of capitalism (consumers), or 2) to my first point: things are overpriced, or say - someone paid for a movie ticket - and then they feel like they've already contributed enough - but want to watch it and download it later, etc. I also have a growing intuitive that "piracy" being legal is the counterpoint to the capitalistic system unfairly gouging/extracting excess value from society. Also an unrelated intuition: ads are a virus related to greed and control which bypasses regular, natural trust and growth mechanisms, e.g. word of mouth learning/education of products/services/communities that normally would warrant analysis, curation, by trusted community leaders - and then those community leaders would meet and share, that knowledge then shared with each community; tribes of people who didn't do this well, who didn't have a good sense of trust or this kind of hierarchical structure for sharing/learning, would have arguably been more easily killed off by other tribes, dis-ease, etc.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
I simply do not understand folks that pirate executable code. You're practically begging for malware and viruses. All it takes is one piece of malware to keylog your bank details, and it will cost you far more than all the software you pirated over your lifetime.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  Altium is like $8k or something. Unaffordable for most individuals.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Individuals really aren't Altium's target market, though, are they? "I can't afford this" isn't a license (no pun intended) for copyright violation -- especially when there are cheaper or free alternatives. There's free PCB design software out there, including Altium's own CircuitMaker. As an aside, I've always found software at this price level to be a bit of a paradox when it comes to piracy -- Altium, Autodesk Maya ($1620/year, currently), and similarly priced vertical market solutions are big fish in tiny ponds. If you're in a business that needs Altium or Maya, you're almost certainly going to pay for it, and conversely, folks who pirate software like that almost certainly don't need it. If I ran such a software company I don't think I'd bother with DRM; your true copy protection dongle is (or at least better be!) the level of support you're giving licensed customers.
    - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      There are cheaper alternatives now that are decent, but the situation was different a few years ago.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      > Individuals really aren't Altium's target market, though, are they? So what? Does this mean I shouldn't be able to play with the big boys' toys? I certainly am not skilled enough to get to the break-even point where I earn back enough money to cover the cost of the program.
tzs 6y ago
The lost sales argument generally only works in isolation. Imagine if Adobe, say, had come up with a way to do perfect DRM so that it was impossible to pirate Photoshop back in the days when it cost several hundred dollars. It's probably true that a huge number of the people who pirated it back then would not have bit the bullet and coughed up the hundreds of dollars for a license, and so them pirating it did not represent a lost sale to Adobe. But...I doubt most of them would have thrown up their hands and said "I can't pirate Photoshop...so I'm just going to give up on graphics editing!" or decided to just do their graphics editing all in MS Paint. A lot of them almost certainly would have bought some other commercial graphics editor that is much less expensive than Photoshop, such as Pixelmator Pro for around $40. That's where the lost sales from piracy turn up--in the sales of the less expensive alternatives that people would have turned to had they not been able to pirate what they pirated.
- majormajor 6y ago
  Former pirate here, I definitely would've shifted some spending around to get a few more games if I'd had to. I probably would've bought fewer DVDs. My money went to movies - harder to pirate at DVD quality back in the late 90s! - because they were better protected than a lot of the games in the late 90s. Or maybe fewer console games, same story there. But those we could rent, too... This wasn't "ecosystem" stuff like Photoshop either, this was games we played for a few months and then moved on.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I wonder if Adobe putting more effort into anti-piracy would have made the GIMP better. For a while, I saw their stance on piracy as look the other way unless it's a business. Photoshop definitely has a learning curve (probably better than the GIMP's), and I could see amateur designers having experience with Photoshop as an asset. That said, Photoshop and Minecraft are completely different products and markets.
- orwin 6y ago
  Or more contributors to GIMP. Let take an art student PoV, one doing MANA in France right now (16-17 yo not eligible for free version) or at any study level before Adobe did this "free for student" stuff. If he can't pirate it, he will use GIMP, probably. Considering my CS school had 5% ex-art student (with or without a complete art degree), if those had used GIMP instead, i'd dare say GIMP would have been close to PS in GUI and ahead in functionalities. So piracy take contributor away from GNU projects!
Zak 6y ago
There are definitely lost sales when it comes to video content. Scenarios like geographic restrictions on streaming certain content, or limiting downloads for offline viewing often drive people who are paying for streaming services to pirate content instead because it's easier.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Definitely not true. I have a "friend" who will buy an ebook if he can't find it on LibGen.
- jbarrs 6y ago
  I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and, candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true. - First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook stores.) - Second, the vast, vast majority of fiction books sell in the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands, and way more often than you think not in the tens of thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller. - And third, contracts for future books often depend on how well previous books sell. A friend of mine published a book a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn't sell as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book. So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A few thousand "lost sales" of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Gender Essentialism is a rounding error; a few thousand "lost sales" of my novel Kismet would literally double the title's revenue if they were converted to real sales.
    - 6y ago
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
This might be true if you have a hit product with multiplayer functionality, but for regular Indie games piracy absolutely leads to lost sales. I implemented anti-piracy techniques into my Indie PC title and saw about a 20% improvement in sales as a result.
- DaveSapien 6y ago
  Could you elaborate? I am nearing the release of my game on PC and would appreciate some tips, thanks.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  It's not a "lost sale". There's no such thing as a "lost sale". Sales of software isn't quantum physics, there's no superposition of "sale" and "lost sale". Your example isn't even meaningful. You had a game for sale and during some period say a 20% improvement in sales. You attribute this to your anti-piracy technique like you added that in isolation of everything else. You have no way of knowing what generated your increase of sales. What's far more likely than the anti-piracy techniques having anything to do with sales is the upload date updated on your distribution platforms and people not only saw it in the "new" section but it had more (or more positive) ratings than the last time you pushed an update. There's only customers and non-customers. There's no difference to you between someone playing a competitor's game, just not buying your game, or pirating your game. They're all just not your customers. There's seven (eight?) billion non-customers on the planet.
- npteljes 6y ago
  I agree with you. I don't get why people are denying the experience of others: DRM and anti-privacy measures improve sales, period. If it's free, people just take it and don't think twice about the creators. Best observed in open source software, where even maintainers of critical components can go without much of a payment, never mind a living wage.
nickjj 6y ago
I think Minecraft is a pretty unique case based on it being incredibly successful and it being a game. The article was written in 2011 but even back then he had over a million individual sales. I forgot how much it cost back then but at $20 you're looking at $20 million in its first year. As a solo developer I can't imagine a world where I would be upset about piracy if I had multi-generational wealth after incrementally developing a game for 2 years. His story is really inspiring tho, it definitely has a ship fast mantra about it if you follow the timeline of its first public release to 1.0'ing. But it being a game is also interesting when talking about piracy. There's a lot of ancillary value in having more exposure. If someone pirates your game but streams it or creates videos around it and those videos get millions of views there's millions of chances someone will buy the game. It becomes organic advertising. Also, the value isn't something you can copy (like a book or video course) and reap the rewards from. The value is the experience of playing the game.
- franciscop 6y ago
  IIRC it was $5 on the alpha, $10 on the beta and $20 on the final version. I recall getting sad that I waited too long until buying it and it was already out of the alpha.
  - wsinks 6y ago
    I remember playing it on alpha and I realize that it was one of the coolest software phenomenons ever. I bought it early and was well rewarded. What a fascinating story, especially to all the minecraft clones
  - zorked 6y ago
    I bought it for $5 on alpha, mostly because I thought Notch was being a bit of a fool trying to sell a hugely pixelated game that ran on the JVM but I thought that he might need a little moral support and that I could be one of the very few people who would ever pay to play it. If only I knew.
- jmiskovic 6y ago
  Notch's quote from this article is very relevant: “If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week”. This was huge factor for early Minecraft to become such success. Pirated sources were always few versions behind and fear of missing out was strong. I find it strange that it didn't inspire more studios to follow similar open style of development.
paxys 6y ago
What he says is true for games with a multiplayer component, lots of replayability, very long lifetime, continuous development, frequent updates etc. (so – Minecraft). However, a majority of single player releases don't fall into this category. The reason why DRM like Denuvo is so widespread is that most sales for such games happen in the first few weeks of release, and people forget about them after 10-20 hours of play time. A $60 single player game which can be pirated on day 1 will absolutely lose a large chunk of its real sales to piracy.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Yes, a couple of days ago there was a story of the guy who made the "dark themes" package and how he got to $100k USD. One thing that got my attention in his article was the purchases chart he showed. When he originally released his product he got pretty high sales; he could not reach those levels of sales after that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ulucs 6y ago
  > most sales for such games happen in the first few weeks of release, and people forget about them after 10-20 hours of play time. Hot take: I support piracy because it hurts the firms I want it to hurt. The market would be much better if AAA games were pirated out of it.
xtracto 6y ago
The title reminded me of the now old "Copying is not Theft" video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
jjjeii3 6y ago
It's much easier to watch a pirated movie copy than pay for a movie service. Just open a website and select video. Done. Registration is not needed, no payments, no subscriptions etc. and if you use an app for a movie service, then they will usually install dozens of trackers. Here is the list of trackers used by a tiny app LastPass: AppsFlyer, Google Analytics, Google CrashLytics, Google Firebase Analytics, Google Tag Manager, MixPixel, Segment When I use a website, most of trackers are blocked by uBlock Origin, so I don't care that much.
- paxys 6y ago
  Are you saying it is easier for the average person to download a Torrent than sign up for Netflix? Because that is absolutely not the case.
  - jjjeii3 6y ago
    No, I mean websites like putlocker etc.
    - rhino369 6y ago
      It's still not easier than netlfix or any major video store.
    - paxys 6y ago
      Those sites have 50x the amount of tracking, popups, spam and straight up malware than even the most intrusive commercial product out there.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    It's easier for the average person to download a Torrent than sign up for Netflix, find out that the thing they wanted isn't there, try to look where it would be available, find services that say it has it, sign up for that, find out that it is available there only for other countries, and when you finally find it somewhere it's not with the language dubbing/subtitiles that you want - meanwhile, the same option you couldn't get legally is easily available on torrents where it Just Works. The illegal services are strong when they win on selection and availability; in markets where it is easier to just sign up for Netflix (I assume they exist, perhaps you live in one of them) undoubtedly privacy gets less popular. And Netflix is a good example, I know people who view on Netflix stuff that's there and pirate the stuff that's not.
api 6y ago
... says billionaire. Piracy is relatively harmless to those who are selling tons of something. In fact it may help them due to increased virality. It could be thought of as deferred revenue or "unintentional marketing spend" if you've got something viral that piracy is helping spread. It can be extremely harmful to small creators and smaller/startup companies who are attempting to make a living or get a business off the ground. It sort of boils down to the diminishing marginal value of money. A small creator losing 20% of barely enough sales to make a living could find themselves in real financial hardship, while a large creator or corporation losing 20% of sales of something high-margin like software or media may not even notice. Edit: Then there's perverse incentives... Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service" with components (or even the whole app) that live only in the cloud. The cloud is the ultimate DRM; you can't pirate it if you don't have it at all. This is creating a generation of software that can't be downloaded or run independently at all. I can run old DOS apps in a VM, but when this stuff goes obsolete or fails it will vanish forever and often take your data with it. It's also a privacy nightmare. Piracy can also create a dumbing down effect if it requires skill. It results in older and/or more educated people pirating and therefore reducing the revenue outcome for the more sophisticated and higher-brow content they consume. I've wondered if this might not be a hidden reason behind the horrid state of pop music. Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less educated audience that doesn't know how to pirate.
- CraneWorm 6y ago
  > Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service" with components (or even the whole app) that live only in the cloud. There are many reasons for moving into saas space: You move into cloud and now your client doesn't have to maintain additional servers, they probably get support too. This becomes a trap because if they decide they don't like your service... now you hold their data too and since it's in your service you control how locked-in with you they've become and how difficult it's to replace you. Now you charge in subscription, you get monies all the time! If your clients are individuals you can now have all manner of stoppers and dark patterns to keep them subscribed! To me... greed, and then more greed are two main drivers for saas. > Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less educated audience that doesn't know how to pirate. Be careful on that high horse up there, if you fall you'll break your neck.
easton_s 6y ago
Customer service is expensive.
CptFribble 6y ago
I think this is a big part of why games have moved to the continuous development/games-as-a-service model. It's not just for longer-term recurring revenue; continuously adding new content is the ultimate DRM, as pirate versions keep falling out of date (for single player games) or the content isn't even accessible without a legit version (for multiplayer games). The confluence of DRM, recurring revenue, and the social nature of humans are why the biggest and most successful games these days are centered around multiplayer elements. I believe it's also why so many companies are trying to produce e-sports titles or shoehorn competitive spectacle into their games. Honestly, the only piracy that's really a problem is larger studios ripping off indie games and either beating them to market (off an early release), or out-marketing them. I'm not a mobile dev, but I've heard tons of stories of independent devs with a decent release getting their games rapidly cloned by the likes of King, who have bigger marketing channels, more money to spend, more devs, and preferred access to spotlight spots on app stores and industry publications. This isn't the kind of piracy the article is talking about, but I think it's the more relevant discussion around software and IP theft.
IndySun 6y ago
Does anyone have a working video link to Mr Minecraft saying this? The link quoted in the article is dead. http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-minecraft-creator http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa... “Piracy is not theft,” he said to those gathered in San Francisco. “If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.”
Bakary 6y ago
A corollary to this is that the neediest and most unpleasant clients tend to be the least lucrative. It's an open secret that raising prices can get you better business in various professions, from escorting to tailors to art commissions. Wealthier people are not only attracted to exclusivity but also prefer to dump money to save time and hassle. With video games, raising prices directly will not work well at all. Instead it is the indirect realization that trying to attract pirates is not a good way to spend time since you won't get a lot of money out of those people even in ideal conditions. They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. With micro-transactions, the case gets muddled further. It becomes rational to spend most of your time catering to whales. In fact, I suspect most features of games using that methodology only exist to attract a large enough audience of normal customers that whales can then prey upon with pay to win additions, while they are themselves preyed upon by the devs.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  > They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. I don't understand how this can possibly be true. You didn't give any reasoning, so I assume it must be related to the first paragraph. Wealthy people are the least picky because there's less risk to purchases they make. A $60 video game for a person who makes 2k a month leaves them closer to poverty than a $120 video game for a person who makes 4k. The latter can drop to the first's living conditions and still be relatively well, while the former's next step in cutting costs is moving to a shitty neighborhood or living in their car. Even if my reasoning isn't bulletproof (I admit I haven't given it extensive thought), I'm not sure it applies to piracy in video games. From my (admittedly anecdotal) experience growing up in a developing country, the thought of paying for video games was ridiculous, not only because of how rare they were to find, but also because everyone was worried about actually getting food on the table. II've always played a lot of video games (with my first console being a hand-me-down SNES), and the first game I got my parents to spend money on was Diablo 2 at the age of 12. Since things were so inaccessible back then, we were also far from picky customers. Especially being in a country where English is not the primary language, half the time we wouldn't even understand the words on screen, and that didn't stop us from playing the same few games we had for hours and hours on end. And interestingly, with video games becoming much more affordable compared to back then, the focus on piracy has also changed. People still do it, but the taboo of spending money on things you like seems to be gone. It's jarring seeing my younger brother have no qualms in asking our parents for money to buy a video game and seeing them actually consider it, compared to laughing him off like what used to happen to me. This leads me to believe piracy is fully a "problem" of accessibility, and I don't believe we gain anything from restricting access to people who literally cannot afford the product in the first place.
dasb 6y ago
Jonathan Blow (Braid & The Witness) on Piracy: https://youtu.be/2MIEVvv1QP0 https://youtu.be/2MIEVvv1QP0
abdulmuhaimin 6y ago
I dont understand why its even a debate. If the creator didnt allow you to use his software, its theft. Sure, there are methods to actually mitigate and make good use of piracy, but then, it effectively become free-to-use-unless-for-business/enterprise model of business. And that should be something that the owner decide, not the user.
- barnabee 6y ago
  No. Stealing implies taking something and depriving its oriignal owner of it not copying against the wishes of the creator. Whatever piracy is, it isn't theft.
- bobbean 6y ago
  If I sneak into a museum (one you would have to pay for) and look at all the art they have on display, but otherwise don't leave a trace, am I stealing?
mindcandy 6y ago
As a game developer, there are two conflicting stories I have heard about game piracy for multiple decades. From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway. From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard. I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course, most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate. I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience. Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with you to attain it.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Every piece of Mac shareware I made was hacked instantly, judging by the “free license codes and patches for games” lists they appeared on. The patch must have been an automated attack, too, given I’d made the deliberate business decision to have a license code check of: licenseText.length > 0
- juskrey 6y ago
  I can confirm that publishers were begging to install the copy protection which at least lasts for several days, not even weeks or months. The math for that was pretty simple - on average, most impatient gamers, who buy the product in the first days, really do not care about the price but will prefer free option. To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits are way different.
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kyleblarson 6y ago
It's easy to have this position once you are already wealthy from your product.
Cypher 6y ago
can confirm, I buy games I enjoy playing after I pirate. if I can't pirate it I don't play it. if u got ads or microtransactions then I don't play. sure the world has moved on to live services and mobile games but I won't play those.
Orochikaku 6y ago
I've commented this quote from Gabe Newell on HN before, it appears this article predates the quote. "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”
- filoleg 6y ago
  Not sure how accurate this quote is, and I agree that it is mainly a service problem, but a pricing problem is a giant chunk of it too. Otherwise Steam wouldn't have such a significantly different regional pricing on games. Pick any AAA game on Steam, and then check its price on SteamDB for each region (SteamDB provides a nice table for it, so you don't need to bother with VPN and checking it on Steam manually yourself). For example, here is one for the recent Yakuza game[0]. $59.99 in the US, $27.61 in Russia. I can pretty much guarantee that without that kind of regional pricing, the sales in Russia for Steam games would be many mani magnitudes lower. 0. https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/ https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/
  - account42 6y ago
    Interestingly, they used to have to different EU price regions, which is not legal [0] [0] https://screenrant.com/valve-fined-9-million-eu-geo-blocking-steam-games/ https://screenrant.com/valve-fined-9-million-eu-geo-blocking...
Svperstar 6y ago
I'm 40 years old so I quit pirating games years ago, when I was 14 and got my first computer I was flat broke so I pirated everything. If somehow it magically became impossible to pirate games when I was 14 they wouldn't have made a dime more off of me then they did, cant get blood from a stone.
- notapenny 6y ago
  It's pretty much the same for me, then again I also didn't have a cent to spend on anything at that age. Even if I would've gotten a small allowance, I wouldn't have been able to buy the volume of stuff I was pirating. And even if money wouldn't have been a problem, availability was. I don't pirate these days, because paying a few bucks for a movie rental isn't that much to me, but availability is still a problem. For awhile Netflix seemed to be a solution but now there are so many streaming services that "Hey, lets watch movie X" can be cumbersome. Wouldn't be the first time that only some service has it that I can't see in my region.
orthecreedence 6y ago
This viewpoint is myopic. I actually agree with pirates about IP, copyright, and ownership. The problem is, they're arguing for public ownership of these things only for themselves. They believe the producers of these games should provide them for free...yet the producers have costs to pay. Sure, at some point, the costs have been repaid, and any additional sales are profit, but without that information being public the only people who can make that determination are insiders. So they wish the producers to make these things but they don't see why they should have to pay for it. In effect, they're arguing for communism without knowing they're doing so, and only arguing for it in a very limited way (while many of them would swear communism off completely). So what is it: do you want the producers to make things for other because they wish to do so, and in return they have their own needs met regardless of the exchange-value of the things they produce? Or do you want capitalism for everybody except yourselves, and for producers to have to suffer your ill-formed view of economics? If you're communists, then great, let's extend this logic to all production. If you're capitalists, then shut the fuck up and pay for the things you buy, as is done in the system you support. I've seen the same logic used by lefists: food is post scarcity! Well, no, it's not. Food itself might be overproduced such that every person could be fed, but the inputs to food are not post-scarcity. The same applies here: game developers make things that are non-scarce, but in order to do so, they themselves require scarce resources. So no, you don't deserve the fruits of their labor for free unless you wish this for everyone.
fossuser 6y ago
This framing is just this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb... "Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary." The truth is there's a tradeoff, and it's a bit of a mixed bag.
IndySun 6y ago
On this post are many singular experiences being touted as rules rather than exceptions. I notice an intense need to simplify, quite often in the simplifiers favour. Can we at least agree that, despite Mr Minecraft's quip, some people still need to be paid for their work to live? And not everyone can work for free?

301 points by ROARosen 6y ago

viro 6y ago

says the guy that got paid $2.5 billion.

carlhjerpe 6y ago
I don't see how that's relevant, he said piracy won't matter for the games success and he was able to cash out 2.5BN even though this was the stance of Mojang. If anything, it proves his point.
deleted 6y ago
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wassenaar10 6y ago
He said this in 2011, 3 years before he got paid $2.5 billion
inetknght 6y ago
Minecraft has been heavily pirated. Despite that, he still ended up getting a massive payout after his claims about piracy.
cortesoft 6y ago
Doesn't that support his point? Game was pirated, still made bank?

swiley 6y ago

It's a bummer he disappeared though I understand why. He had a lot of good stuff to say. Edit: Oh I guess he's still on twitter.

Karawebnetwork 6y ago
Did he? His Twitter is still active and his last message was 34 minutes ago.
vernie 6y ago
It's a bummer that he didn't disappear.
Vetre 6y ago
wasn't he transphobic and racist? I remember seeing a lot of news about how bad he was online.
- seph-reed 6y ago
  Honestly, I'd say he was making the same logical fallacies that pretty much every other human on Earth is making. But it is the case that the output of his errors were extremely socially unacceptable. This is how I feel about most situations where someone tries to claim they are good and the other is bad. To me, it's really just that one is lucky and the other is not. Neither is substantially more aware of their own cognitive shortcomings, and -- even when they are -- that's a form of luck as well. Of all the privileges in life, I think the last I'd be willing to trade is sanity. And sanity is basically just more or less fallacies per thought. I'm tired of the words "good" and "bad" being applied amidst people who are all running the same OS.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    >people who are all running the same OS I don't think we can claim that by any stretch.
    - seph-reed 6y ago
      Compare it to DogOS or CowOS or even FungiOS. We are extremely sensitive to our own differences. But humans are by and large very, very similar when put in perspective of all life.
      - LocalH 6y ago
        I still disagree on the latter part. Our OS is largely cobbled together by our brains on the fly, and so everyone's is quite unique and based on their life experience.
        seph-reed 6y ago
        Ah. We're on a nature vs nurture debate. Ofc, it's a spectrum. And as we evolve we go from being more nature based to being more nurture based. But I'd say we're a long way off from being more nurture than nature, given that 100% nurture would be a being fully capable of self design. Most people can't even stop themselves from procrastinating (like me right now). We can't even manage to coexist with the planet, when we know it's going to destroy everything when we don't. If you want to believe that us big great humans are in control of ourselves and unlike those stupid animals we're products of nurture, that's your dopamine hit to take. But based off everything I've seen, the only time we really become our brains is when the the Pre-frontal cortex is engaged and suppresses all the other more instinctual parts of the brain. And even for very smart and/or dedicated people, it's extremely difficult to quiet all natural instincts for any extended length of time. IMO, we're barely out of the bushes in terms of the path from being beasts of nature to becoming beings of self-design and nurture.

renewiltord 6y ago

Interesting to me how communities form ideas around this. While “piracy is not theft”, you’ll see people talk about how some repost “stole my content” with lots of support for the supposed victim. Simultaneously, some people will say that they are contributing by using a product and telling their friends while others will post on /r/choosingbeggars to mock the exposure argument. This implies we are somewhat short of universal agreement on this subject: perhaps far enough that we cannot determine that just because “piracy is not theft”, it does not mean it is acceptable.

maedla 6y ago
Isn't this just plagiarism? No one is downloading Photoshop and saying they created it (probably lol).
skummetmaelk 6y ago
There's a difference between copying for personal use and distributing to others against payment of any type. Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder. Piracy not being theft only applies if you would have _never_ bought the product in the first place, had it not been free to copy. If you redistribute some content on youtube you are "stealing" eyeballs and ad money from the original creator.
- aequitas 6y ago
  > Redistributing against payment implies that the purchaser is willing to pay in the first place and of course that payment should be made to the original creator / rights holder. This argument can get muddy because of parties that are involved between the creator and the consumer, like record companies. Where sometimes the original creator does not see any money (or an unfair low amount) and all the intermediates reap the most profit for basically sitting on an acquired IP or copyright. I'd love to give money to a original creator for their effort in creating their art to support them to create more, but I hate to fuel an industry that is actively fighting creation and innovation by lobbying for extended copyright and artificially fragmenting supply and hindering paying users with DRM (digital restrictions management).

CharlesW 6y ago

Previous discussion with some interesting thoughts on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283785

scj 6y ago

There's a difference between a stowaway and taking the ship. One's infringement, the other is piracy (or theft in the more general case).

contravariant 6y ago
I can't deny that taking the ship counts as piracy, but I think that's somewhat different from the kind being discussed here.
f1refly 6y ago
You don't take the ship though, you copy the ship. There will be two ships, one for you and the original. It's a win-win situation.

tgbugs 6y ago

In my memory Gabe Newell was one of the first to articulate this point in the game dev community, however going back to check the dates, it seems that it was in October or November of 2011, suggesting that Notch may actually have kicked off this thread.

lloeki 6y ago
2008 report from 2D Boy: ~90% piracy rate for World of Goo https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy It was one of the first reports with halfway solid data. And the argument dates from way before that.
- kuschku 6y ago
  And the other article it links shows that 1000 pirated copies only convert into 1 single legitimate copy. So if you have a 90% piracy rate, and eliminate all pirates, your sales increase by roughly 1%.

bni 6y ago

Some games surely has lost sales due to piracy. Recent example: Doom Eternal was shipped with an unencrypted exe in a subfolder by mistake. Surely lots of people that would have impulse bought the hot new game didn't when it could be torrented on launch.

the_af 6y ago
I think people who impulse buy will impulse buy no matter what. About people downloading illegal copies, in TFA Notch is quoted as saying: > “If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week” He also argues that the concept of "lost sales" itself is dodgy, or at least used carelessly. Some examples he mentions: > “Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?”
musingsole 6y ago
Lack of product awareness among consumers is far more of a suppressing force to profits than converting every last bit of interest in your product to monetary value is a boost to profits. This is likely less true for certain AAA titles, but on the whole, most people who buy things are busy and not avidly following any one brand in particularly. Fanboys (despite their clamor) are rarer than casual purchasers for most everything. In an absolute sense, there may be "lost sales" due to piracy, but that comparison misses any potential additional sales due to piracy helping to spread awareness of a product.
account42 6y ago
> Recent example: Doom Eternal was shipped with an unencrypted exe in a subfolder by mistake. Surely lots of people that would have impulse bought the hot new game didn't when it could be torrented on launch. I don't think it counts as an example when the lost sales are an assumption and not backed by data.

incrudible 6y ago

> Lost sales don't exist That's easily disproven. When SWIM was young, he used to pirate lots of games, most of which he wouldn't have bought, but some of which he would have bought if there had not been a working day zero PDX release. In this manner, SWIM saved some money to invest in weed instead.

loceng 6y ago

I have a strong intuition that if you price things fairly, if you're governing well, people will be willing to pay - and that piracy ultimately happens because either 1) society isn't providing enough foundational resources to the largest cog in the wheel of capitalism (consumers), or 2) to my first point: things are overpriced, or say - someone paid for a movie ticket - and then they feel like they've already contributed enough - but want to watch it and download it later, etc. I also have a growing intuitive that "piracy" being legal is the counterpoint to the capitalistic system unfairly gouging/extracting excess value from society. Also an unrelated intuition: ads are a virus related to greed and control which bypasses regular, natural trust and growth mechanisms, e.g. word of mouth learning/education of products/services/communities that normally would warrant analysis, curation, by trusted community leaders - and then those community leaders would meet and share, that knowledge then shared with each community; tribes of people who didn't do this well, who didn't have a good sense of trust or this kind of hierarchical structure for sharing/learning, would have arguably been more easily killed off by other tribes, dis-ease, etc.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

I simply do not understand folks that pirate executable code. You're practically begging for malware and viruses. All it takes is one piece of malware to keylog your bank details, and it will cost you far more than all the software you pirated over your lifetime.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Altium is like $8k or something. Unaffordable for most individuals.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Individuals really aren't Altium's target market, though, are they? "I can't afford this" isn't a license (no pun intended) for copyright violation -- especially when there are cheaper or free alternatives. There's free PCB design software out there, including Altium's own CircuitMaker. As an aside, I've always found software at this price level to be a bit of a paradox when it comes to piracy -- Altium, Autodesk Maya ($1620/year, currently), and similarly priced vertical market solutions are big fish in tiny ponds. If you're in a business that needs Altium or Maya, you're almost certainly going to pay for it, and conversely, folks who pirate software like that almost certainly don't need it. If I ran such a software company I don't think I'd bother with DRM; your true copy protection dongle is (or at least better be!) the level of support you're giving licensed customers.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    There are cheaper alternatives now that are decent, but the situation was different a few years ago.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    > Individuals really aren't Altium's target market, though, are they? So what? Does this mean I shouldn't be able to play with the big boys' toys? I certainly am not skilled enough to get to the break-even point where I earn back enough money to cover the cost of the program.

tzs 6y ago

The lost sales argument generally only works in isolation. Imagine if Adobe, say, had come up with a way to do perfect DRM so that it was impossible to pirate Photoshop back in the days when it cost several hundred dollars. It's probably true that a huge number of the people who pirated it back then would not have bit the bullet and coughed up the hundreds of dollars for a license, and so them pirating it did not represent a lost sale to Adobe. But...I doubt most of them would have thrown up their hands and said "I can't pirate Photoshop...so I'm just going to give up on graphics editing!" or decided to just do their graphics editing all in MS Paint. A lot of them almost certainly would have bought some other commercial graphics editor that is much less expensive than Photoshop, such as Pixelmator Pro for around $40. That's where the lost sales from piracy turn up--in the sales of the less expensive alternatives that people would have turned to had they not been able to pirate what they pirated.

majormajor 6y ago
Former pirate here, I definitely would've shifted some spending around to get a few more games if I'd had to. I probably would've bought fewer DVDs. My money went to movies - harder to pirate at DVD quality back in the late 90s! - because they were better protected than a lot of the games in the late 90s. Or maybe fewer console games, same story there. But those we could rent, too... This wasn't "ecosystem" stuff like Photoshop either, this was games we played for a few months and then moved on.
dehrmann 6y ago
I wonder if Adobe putting more effort into anti-piracy would have made the GIMP better. For a while, I saw their stance on piracy as look the other way unless it's a business. Photoshop definitely has a learning curve (probably better than the GIMP's), and I could see amateur designers having experience with Photoshop as an asset. That said, Photoshop and Minecraft are completely different products and markets.
orwin 6y ago
Or more contributors to GIMP. Let take an art student PoV, one doing MANA in France right now (16-17 yo not eligible for free version) or at any study level before Adobe did this "free for student" stuff. If he can't pirate it, he will use GIMP, probably. Considering my CS school had 5% ex-art student (with or without a complete art degree), if those had used GIMP instead, i'd dare say GIMP would have been close to PS in GUI and ahead in functionalities. So piracy take contributor away from GNU projects!

Zak 6y ago

There are definitely lost sales when it comes to video content. Scenarios like geographic restrictions on streaming certain content, or limiting downloads for offline viewing often drive people who are paying for streaming services to pirate content instead because it's easier.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

Definitely not true. I have a "friend" who will buy an ebook if he can't find it on LibGen.

jbarrs 6y ago
I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Pirating novels also, well, should make people feel at least a little bad. I think there's this perception -- and, candidly, I think it's a perception that sites like TorrentFreak (where the linked article is on) push -- that Greedy Big Corporate Publishers take all the money and the creator doesn't get anything to speak of from an individual single sale. I can't speak to all industries, but in fiction publishing, this is absolutely, unequivocally not true. - First, you really do get per-unit royalties, and it's not "just a few cents"; even with traditional publishers, ebook royalties are 25% or more. (With my publisher, I get 50% if you buy directly from them and 35% if you buy on other ebook stores.) - Second, the vast, vast majority of fiction books sell in the thousands. Not millions, not even hundreds of thousands, and way more often than you think not in the tens of thousands. For a small press, a title that sells 5000 copies across its lifetime might qualify as a runaway best seller. - And third, contracts for future books often depend on how well previous books sell. A friend of mine published a book a few years ago that sold decently and was even nominated for a Nebula Award. Its sequel was well-reviewed but didn't sell as well, and even though it was meant as a trilogy, the publisher doesn't seem interested in the third book. So don't use the sales of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King or the like as a yardstick for how piracy affects fiction writers. A few thousand "lost sales" of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Gender Essentialism is a rounding error; a few thousand "lost sales" of my novel Kismet would literally double the title's revenue if they were converted to real sales.
  - 6y ago

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

This might be true if you have a hit product with multiplayer functionality, but for regular Indie games piracy absolutely leads to lost sales. I implemented anti-piracy techniques into my Indie PC title and saw about a 20% improvement in sales as a result.

DaveSapien 6y ago
Could you elaborate? I am nearing the release of my game on PC and would appreciate some tips, thanks.
giantrobot 6y ago
It's not a "lost sale". There's no such thing as a "lost sale". Sales of software isn't quantum physics, there's no superposition of "sale" and "lost sale". Your example isn't even meaningful. You had a game for sale and during some period say a 20% improvement in sales. You attribute this to your anti-piracy technique like you added that in isolation of everything else. You have no way of knowing what generated your increase of sales. What's far more likely than the anti-piracy techniques having anything to do with sales is the upload date updated on your distribution platforms and people not only saw it in the "new" section but it had more (or more positive) ratings than the last time you pushed an update. There's only customers and non-customers. There's no difference to you between someone playing a competitor's game, just not buying your game, or pirating your game. They're all just not your customers. There's seven (eight?) billion non-customers on the planet.
npteljes 6y ago
I agree with you. I don't get why people are denying the experience of others: DRM and anti-privacy measures improve sales, period. If it's free, people just take it and don't think twice about the creators. Best observed in open source software, where even maintainers of critical components can go without much of a payment, never mind a living wage.

nickjj 6y ago

I think Minecraft is a pretty unique case based on it being incredibly successful and it being a game. The article was written in 2011 but even back then he had over a million individual sales. I forgot how much it cost back then but at $20 you're looking at $20 million in its first year. As a solo developer I can't imagine a world where I would be upset about piracy if I had multi-generational wealth after incrementally developing a game for 2 years. His story is really inspiring tho, it definitely has a ship fast mantra about it if you follow the timeline of its first public release to 1.0'ing. But it being a game is also interesting when talking about piracy. There's a lot of ancillary value in having more exposure. If someone pirates your game but streams it or creates videos around it and those videos get millions of views there's millions of chances someone will buy the game. It becomes organic advertising. Also, the value isn't something you can copy (like a book or video course) and reap the rewards from. The value is the experience of playing the game.

franciscop 6y ago
IIRC it was $5 on the alpha, $10 on the beta and $20 on the final version. I recall getting sad that I waited too long until buying it and it was already out of the alpha.
- wsinks 6y ago
  I remember playing it on alpha and I realize that it was one of the coolest software phenomenons ever. I bought it early and was well rewarded. What a fascinating story, especially to all the minecraft clones
- zorked 6y ago
  I bought it for $5 on alpha, mostly because I thought Notch was being a bit of a fool trying to sell a hugely pixelated game that ran on the JVM but I thought that he might need a little moral support and that I could be one of the very few people who would ever pay to play it. If only I knew.
jmiskovic 6y ago
Notch's quote from this article is very relevant: “If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week”. This was huge factor for early Minecraft to become such success. Pirated sources were always few versions behind and fear of missing out was strong. I find it strange that it didn't inspire more studios to follow similar open style of development.

paxys 6y ago

What he says is true for games with a multiplayer component, lots of replayability, very long lifetime, continuous development, frequent updates etc. (so – Minecraft). However, a majority of single player releases don't fall into this category. The reason why DRM like Denuvo is so widespread is that most sales for such games happen in the first few weeks of release, and people forget about them after 10-20 hours of play time. A $60 single player game which can be pirated on day 1 will absolutely lose a large chunk of its real sales to piracy.

xtracto 6y ago
Yes, a couple of days ago there was a story of the guy who made the "dark themes" package and how he got to $100k USD. One thing that got my attention in his article was the purchases chart he showed. When he originally released his product he got pretty high sales; he could not reach those levels of sales after that.
deleted 6y ago
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ulucs 6y ago
> most sales for such games happen in the first few weeks of release, and people forget about them after 10-20 hours of play time. Hot take: I support piracy because it hurts the firms I want it to hurt. The market would be much better if AAA games were pirated out of it.

xtracto 6y ago

The title reminded me of the now old "Copying is not Theft" video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

jjjeii3 6y ago

It's much easier to watch a pirated movie copy than pay for a movie service. Just open a website and select video. Done. Registration is not needed, no payments, no subscriptions etc. and if you use an app for a movie service, then they will usually install dozens of trackers. Here is the list of trackers used by a tiny app LastPass: AppsFlyer, Google Analytics, Google CrashLytics, Google Firebase Analytics, Google Tag Manager, MixPixel, Segment When I use a website, most of trackers are blocked by uBlock Origin, so I don't care that much.

paxys 6y ago
Are you saying it is easier for the average person to download a Torrent than sign up for Netflix? Because that is absolutely not the case.
- jjjeii3 6y ago
  No, I mean websites like putlocker etc.
  - rhino369 6y ago
    It's still not easier than netlfix or any major video store.
  - paxys 6y ago
    Those sites have 50x the amount of tracking, popups, spam and straight up malware than even the most intrusive commercial product out there.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  It's easier for the average person to download a Torrent than sign up for Netflix, find out that the thing they wanted isn't there, try to look where it would be available, find services that say it has it, sign up for that, find out that it is available there only for other countries, and when you finally find it somewhere it's not with the language dubbing/subtitiles that you want - meanwhile, the same option you couldn't get legally is easily available on torrents where it Just Works. The illegal services are strong when they win on selection and availability; in markets where it is easier to just sign up for Netflix (I assume they exist, perhaps you live in one of them) undoubtedly privacy gets less popular. And Netflix is a good example, I know people who view on Netflix stuff that's there and pirate the stuff that's not.

api 6y ago

... says billionaire. Piracy is relatively harmless to those who are selling tons of something. In fact it may help them due to increased virality. It could be thought of as deferred revenue or "unintentional marketing spend" if you've got something viral that piracy is helping spread. It can be extremely harmful to small creators and smaller/startup companies who are attempting to make a living or get a business off the ground. It sort of boils down to the diminishing marginal value of money. A small creator losing 20% of barely enough sales to make a living could find themselves in real financial hardship, while a large creator or corporation losing 20% of sales of something high-margin like software or media may not even notice. Edit: Then there's perverse incentives... Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service" with components (or even the whole app) that live only in the cloud. The cloud is the ultimate DRM; you can't pirate it if you don't have it at all. This is creating a generation of software that can't be downloaded or run independently at all. I can run old DOS apps in a VM, but when this stuff goes obsolete or fails it will vanish forever and often take your data with it. It's also a privacy nightmare. Piracy can also create a dumbing down effect if it requires skill. It results in older and/or more educated people pirating and therefore reducing the revenue outcome for the more sophisticated and higher-brow content they consume. I've wondered if this might not be a hidden reason behind the horrid state of pop music. Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less educated audience that doesn't know how to pirate.

CraneWorm 6y ago
> Piracy is a driver for so much software becoming a "service" with components (or even the whole app) that live only in the cloud. There are many reasons for moving into saas space: You move into cloud and now your client doesn't have to maintain additional servers, they probably get support too. This becomes a trap because if they decide they don't like your service... now you hold their data too and since it's in your service you control how locked-in with you they've become and how difficult it's to replace you. Now you charge in subscription, you get monies all the time! If your clients are individuals you can now have all manner of stoppers and dark patterns to keep them subscribed! To me... greed, and then more greed are two main drivers for saas. > Cheap catchy low-brow pop aims at a younger and less educated audience that doesn't know how to pirate. Be careful on that high horse up there, if you fall you'll break your neck.

easton_s 6y ago

Customer service is expensive.

CptFribble 6y ago

I think this is a big part of why games have moved to the continuous development/games-as-a-service model. It's not just for longer-term recurring revenue; continuously adding new content is the ultimate DRM, as pirate versions keep falling out of date (for single player games) or the content isn't even accessible without a legit version (for multiplayer games). The confluence of DRM, recurring revenue, and the social nature of humans are why the biggest and most successful games these days are centered around multiplayer elements. I believe it's also why so many companies are trying to produce e-sports titles or shoehorn competitive spectacle into their games. Honestly, the only piracy that's really a problem is larger studios ripping off indie games and either beating them to market (off an early release), or out-marketing them. I'm not a mobile dev, but I've heard tons of stories of independent devs with a decent release getting their games rapidly cloned by the likes of King, who have bigger marketing channels, more money to spend, more devs, and preferred access to spotlight spots on app stores and industry publications. This isn't the kind of piracy the article is talking about, but I think it's the more relevant discussion around software and IP theft.

IndySun 6y ago

Does anyone have a working video link to Mr Minecraft saying this? The link quoted in the article is dead. http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-minecraft-creator http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa... “Piracy is not theft,” he said to those gathered in San Francisco. “If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.”

Bakary 6y ago

A corollary to this is that the neediest and most unpleasant clients tend to be the least lucrative. It's an open secret that raising prices can get you better business in various professions, from escorting to tailors to art commissions. Wealthier people are not only attracted to exclusivity but also prefer to dump money to save time and hassle. With video games, raising prices directly will not work well at all. Instead it is the indirect realization that trying to attract pirates is not a good way to spend time since you won't get a lot of money out of those people even in ideal conditions. They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. With micro-transactions, the case gets muddled further. It becomes rational to spend most of your time catering to whales. In fact, I suspect most features of games using that methodology only exist to attract a large enough audience of normal customers that whales can then prey upon with pay to win additions, while they are themselves preyed upon by the devs.

Kaze404 6y ago
> They are also the type of person more likely to complain about minute details in games. I don't understand how this can possibly be true. You didn't give any reasoning, so I assume it must be related to the first paragraph. Wealthy people are the least picky because there's less risk to purchases they make. A $60 video game for a person who makes 2k a month leaves them closer to poverty than a $120 video game for a person who makes 4k. The latter can drop to the first's living conditions and still be relatively well, while the former's next step in cutting costs is moving to a shitty neighborhood or living in their car. Even if my reasoning isn't bulletproof (I admit I haven't given it extensive thought), I'm not sure it applies to piracy in video games. From my (admittedly anecdotal) experience growing up in a developing country, the thought of paying for video games was ridiculous, not only because of how rare they were to find, but also because everyone was worried about actually getting food on the table. II've always played a lot of video games (with my first console being a hand-me-down SNES), and the first game I got my parents to spend money on was Diablo 2 at the age of 12. Since things were so inaccessible back then, we were also far from picky customers. Especially being in a country where English is not the primary language, half the time we wouldn't even understand the words on screen, and that didn't stop us from playing the same few games we had for hours and hours on end. And interestingly, with video games becoming much more affordable compared to back then, the focus on piracy has also changed. People still do it, but the taboo of spending money on things you like seems to be gone. It's jarring seeing my younger brother have no qualms in asking our parents for money to buy a video game and seeing them actually consider it, compared to laughing him off like what used to happen to me. This leads me to believe piracy is fully a "problem" of accessibility, and I don't believe we gain anything from restricting access to people who literally cannot afford the product in the first place.

dasb 6y ago

Jonathan Blow (Braid & The Witness) on Piracy: https://youtu.be/2MIEVvv1QP0 https://youtu.be/2MIEVvv1QP0

abdulmuhaimin 6y ago

I dont understand why its even a debate. If the creator didnt allow you to use his software, its theft. Sure, there are methods to actually mitigate and make good use of piracy, but then, it effectively become free-to-use-unless-for-business/enterprise model of business. And that should be something that the owner decide, not the user.

barnabee 6y ago
No. Stealing implies taking something and depriving its oriignal owner of it not copying against the wishes of the creator. Whatever piracy is, it isn't theft.
bobbean 6y ago
If I sneak into a museum (one you would have to pay for) and look at all the art they have on display, but otherwise don't leave a trace, am I stealing?

mindcandy 6y ago

As a game developer, there are two conflicting stories I have heard about game piracy for multiple decades. From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway. From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard. I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course, most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate. I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience. Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with you to attain it.

ben_w 6y ago
Every piece of Mac shareware I made was hacked instantly, judging by the “free license codes and patches for games” lists they appeared on. The patch must have been an automated attack, too, given I’d made the deliberate business decision to have a license code check of: licenseText.length > 0
juskrey 6y ago
I can confirm that publishers were begging to install the copy protection which at least lasts for several days, not even weeks or months. The math for that was pretty simple - on average, most impatient gamers, who buy the product in the first days, really do not care about the price but will prefer free option. To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits are way different.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kyleblarson 6y ago

It's easy to have this position once you are already wealthy from your product.

Cypher 6y ago

can confirm, I buy games I enjoy playing after I pirate. if I can't pirate it I don't play it. if u got ads or microtransactions then I don't play. sure the world has moved on to live services and mobile games but I won't play those.

Orochikaku 6y ago

I've commented this quote from Gabe Newell on HN before, it appears this article predates the quote. "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”

filoleg 6y ago
Not sure how accurate this quote is, and I agree that it is mainly a service problem, but a pricing problem is a giant chunk of it too. Otherwise Steam wouldn't have such a significantly different regional pricing on games. Pick any AAA game on Steam, and then check its price on SteamDB for each region (SteamDB provides a nice table for it, so you don't need to bother with VPN and checking it on Steam manually yourself). For example, here is one for the recent Yakuza game[0]. $59.99 in the US, $27.61 in Russia. I can pretty much guarantee that without that kind of regional pricing, the sales in Russia for Steam games would be many mani magnitudes lower. 0. https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/ https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/
- account42 6y ago
  Interestingly, they used to have to different EU price regions, which is not legal [0] [0] https://screenrant.com/valve-fined-9-million-eu-geo-blocking-steam-games/ https://screenrant.com/valve-fined-9-million-eu-geo-blocking...

Svperstar 6y ago

I'm 40 years old so I quit pirating games years ago, when I was 14 and got my first computer I was flat broke so I pirated everything. If somehow it magically became impossible to pirate games when I was 14 they wouldn't have made a dime more off of me then they did, cant get blood from a stone.

notapenny 6y ago
It's pretty much the same for me, then again I also didn't have a cent to spend on anything at that age. Even if I would've gotten a small allowance, I wouldn't have been able to buy the volume of stuff I was pirating. And even if money wouldn't have been a problem, availability was. I don't pirate these days, because paying a few bucks for a movie rental isn't that much to me, but availability is still a problem. For awhile Netflix seemed to be a solution but now there are so many streaming services that "Hey, lets watch movie X" can be cumbersome. Wouldn't be the first time that only some service has it that I can't see in my region.

orthecreedence 6y ago

This viewpoint is myopic. I actually agree with pirates about IP, copyright, and ownership. The problem is, they're arguing for public ownership of these things only for themselves. They believe the producers of these games should provide them for free...yet the producers have costs to pay. Sure, at some point, the costs have been repaid, and any additional sales are profit, but without that information being public the only people who can make that determination are insiders. So they wish the producers to make these things but they don't see why they should have to pay for it. In effect, they're arguing for communism without knowing they're doing so, and only arguing for it in a very limited way (while many of them would swear communism off completely). So what is it: do you want the producers to make things for other because they wish to do so, and in return they have their own needs met regardless of the exchange-value of the things they produce? Or do you want capitalism for everybody except yourselves, and for producers to have to suffer your ill-formed view of economics? If you're communists, then great, let's extend this logic to all production. If you're capitalists, then shut the fuck up and pay for the things you buy, as is done in the system you support. I've seen the same logic used by lefists: food is post scarcity! Well, no, it's not. Food itself might be overproduced such that every person could be fed, but the inputs to food are not post-scarcity. The same applies here: game developers make things that are non-scarce, but in order to do so, they themselves require scarce resources. So no, you don't deserve the fruits of their labor for free unless you wish this for everyone.

fossuser 6y ago

This framing is just this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb... "Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary." The truth is there's a tradeoff, and it's a bit of a mixed bag.

IndySun 6y ago

On this post are many singular experiences being touted as rules rather than exceptions. I notice an intense need to simplify, quite often in the simplifiers favour. Can we at least agree that, despite Mr Minecraft's quip, some people still need to be paid for their work to live? And not everyone can work for free?